Chapter 2 Major Cardiac Event Weston
Weston
So this is how it ends.
Me having a legit heart attack while locking eyes with the girl I never should’ve let go.
Josie Reid’s grown up. She was always beautiful, but now—
Now she’s an absolute knockout. Long pale hair. Full lips. Big blue eyes framed by long lashes. Soft skin. Soft curves that I remember tracing over and over again with my fingertips, convinced that heaven really is a place on earth.
Bikinis that tiny should be illegal. Hers is deceptively simple, just a black top and bottoms I glimpse through a transparent piece of “fabric” she’s tied around her waist. But the bikini is all strings, her perfect tits swelling out the sides of the teeny tops. I glimpse the curve of an ass cheek.
A bare ass cheek.
Okay, I changed my mind. Bikinis like this should be celebrated and worn every day of the week.
But Josie should only wear them for me. Jealousy, vicious and sudden, grips my windpipe when I catch several pairs of eyes shamelessly checking her out.
When her gaze meets mine, my heart takes a swan dive into my stomach. We hold eye contact for one frantic heartbeat, then another. Another.
Another.
I can’t look away.
I don’t want to look away. Six years of stewing over my mistakes have taught me many things. But the most important one is that I need to win my Josie girl back.
I try to keep my steps steady, even, as I close the distance between us. Don’t want to scare her off. No doubt she despises me. And for good reason.
It’s gonna take some real work to win her over. But I got a strong back and slow hands. I’m also a third-generation rancher in charge of one thousand head of cattle, thirty employees, and ten thousand acres of land.
I’d like to think I’m up to the task of winning my girl over. I’m not afraid to show the world who I really am anymore. I’m not some insecure twentysomething obsessed with what his friends think. I’m a man now, one who’s been through hell in the hopes of finding heaven.
“Hey, Josie.” My skin lights up at the way her eyes trail down my body, then back up again. “Good to see you.”
I don’t know what to do with my hands. Do I hug her? Shake it out? Go in for a fist bump?
Dear Lord, no fist bumps. Been a minute since I dated. I got no idea how this shit works.
She smiles. It doesn’t touch her eyes. “Hey, Wes.”
Aw, honey, I’m so sorry.
“We’re happy to have you back.” I put my hands on my hips. Mostly so I don’t reach for her. “Being rich and famous suits you. You look great. You still look great.”
She smells like summer: sunscreen and that cherry ChapStick she used to keep her lips from getting sunburnt. I remember the taste well.
“And you finally own a swimsuit. Guess you’ve bought all the Stetsons you need?”
I laugh, reaching down to tug at the trunks that cling to my thighs. “A man can never have too many Stetsons.”
“Truth,” Grady says.
“I’m also into jewelry now, thank you very much.” I hook a thumb around the gold chain I wear around my neck.
She furrows her brow. “Since when do you wear slutty gold necklaces?”
“Since you said you liked slutty gold necklaces in that interview you gave after you won all those CMA awards. Four of ’em, right?”
Josie may roll her eyes, but I don’t miss how her cheeks turn pink. “Have you been stalking me?”
“Yes.” I also weasel updates out of Grady every chance I get.
I try not to talk to him too much about Josie and me. He said she told him our breakup was mutual, and I imagine she had her reasons for doing that.
But I’ve always regretted letting her go. And after working with a therapist over the past few years and doing a good bit of growing up on the ranch, I feel like I’m finally in a place to make things right.
It took some convincing to get Grady on board with my plan to win her back. Totally understandable, even if he doesn’t know the whole story. But I’m hoping he knows enough to make the right call.
We decided not to tell Quinn. It’s her wedding weekend. There’s also a good chance I fall on my face, so we didn’t want to get her hopes up.
And, yeah, if I’m being honest, I worried she wouldn’t let me make the attempt. I’m sure Josie told her how our breakup actually went down. Quinn likes me because I’m her fiancé’s friend, but she’s always kept a good bit of distance between her and me. I imagine there’s a reason for that.
“Stalking? Really, Weston,” Josie says.
“Yes, really, Josephine.” I’m smiling. “It’s fun watching you live the life you always dreamed of.”
Her eyelashes flutter. “That’s illegal, you know. Stalking.”
“How good you look in that swimsuit is illegal.”
She levels me with eyes that flash. There’s my girl. “You’re not supposed to say that shit out loud.”
“I learned the hard way that keeping shit inside is a bad idea. I know better now.”
Her expression softens. Just a little.
Just enough to let me know that she knows I’m not talking about bikinis and gold chains.
Maybe—just maybe—this woman will give me another chance.
Grady eyes us. “I feel like we should maybe give y’all a minute to, uh, catch up?”
“Only if Josie wants that,” Quinn replies, glancing at her friend.
“Agreed. Only if Josie agrees.” I hold her eyes. They’re beautiful in the ardent, late-afternoon light, a shade of pale blue that matches the color of a summer sky in the morning.
I love mornings.
Josie hesitates. My pulse thumps.
“Actually,” she says at last, bringing the beer can she’s holding to her lips, “I think I’d like to go for a swim. This heat.”
“Don’t tell me your blood’s thinned living way up there in Tennessee.”
Josie knocks back her Shiner, her throat working with each swallow. Lust, frank and hot, gathers low in my core.
I give my bathing suit another tug. No one—and I mean no one—has ever turned me on like Josie Reid.
Lowering the can, she crumples it in her hand and looks me in the eye. “You calling me a wimp?”
My pulse skips. The fire in her—it’s back. The same fire and fight I saw in her when she’d sing as I played my guitar on warm summer nights like this one.
I feel like hollering. Some things never change, thank Christ.
“I’m just saying that you took the girl out of Texas. But did you take the Texas out of the girl too?”
Dropping her can into a nearby trash bag, Josie reaches for the knot of fabric at her hip. “You tell me.”
I nearly have my second heart attack of the day when her cover-up falls away, revealing the sexiest pair of long, tanned legs in existence.
I read all about the intense workout routine she underwent to prepare for her worldwide tour.
Girl did two-a-days for months on end. Her trainer commented he’d never seen anyone show up the way she did. Not even professional athletes.
Her hard work shows. I bring my hand to my mouth and bite down on the knuckle of my first finger, hard.
Quinn takes the cover-up, a blank look on her face. Is she in shock? Or is she about to cuss me out for antagonizing her best friend?
Whatever the case, she doesn’t stop Josie from marching over to the rope and grabbing it.
I hustle to the edge of the canyon. “Let me go first. That way I can be there if—”
But Josie is already taking a running leap over the edge. She lets out a loud holler of delight as she swings outward. The last thing I see is her wide, happy smile before she lets go and plunges into the glittering green-blue water below.
She doesn’t emerge.
My body reacts before my brain does. I grab the rope as it swings back to me. Taking one, two big steps back, I launch myself over the canyon. I’m careful to let go at a moment that will allow me to land far enough from where Josie disappeared.
My stomach shoots up the back of my throat as I fall. I see her head break the surface of the water just as I plunge beneath it.
The rush of cold that greets me is a welcome antidote to the heat coursing through my limbs. The Colorado is deep here. Deep enough that I never touch the bottom, and I have to kick my way to the surface.
“Jesus Christ, Josie,” I gasp, snapping my head so that my hair’s out of my face. “Are you trying to kill me? I thought you were drowning.”
She treads water, bobbing in time to the movement of her arms. “Killing you would mean that I care. I don’t.”
“Ouch.”
“Truth hurts.”
I meet her eyes. “One of my favorite songs of yours.”
Sometimes I wonder if she’s ever written a song about me. Her melodies are beautiful, sometimes upbeat. But her lyrics are searing in their honesty.
Their intensity.
I always feel a surge of guilt over the possibility that I made her feel all that loss and loneliness she sings about.
I know that loneliness well. Granted, it was self-imposed. I listened to my friends and brothers when they told me not to follow Josie. You’re a cowboy—you can’t go to Nashville. What the hell is a country boy like you gonna do in a city like that?
Truth is, I was too much of a coward to show everyone I loved Josie so much that I’d put her dreams before mine. It felt embarrassing—a betrayal of everything I’d ever learned about being a man.
Now I see how wrong I was. A real man doesn’t avoid his feelings or shut them down. He owns them. Feels them. And he follows his heart, no matter what anyone thinks.
“Look,” she says. “You and I don’t have to be friends for this to be a good weekend. Just—you do your thing and I’ll do mine, and everything will be fine.”
I dip my head so that my lips are in the water. I gotta respect her pain—her instinct to keep her distance.
At the same time, I know I don’t have much, er, time. Grady says she’s leaving bright and early Sunday morning to make her next tour date in Kansas City. Given how busy we’ll be this weekend, that only gives me a handful of hours at best to win her over.
To convince her that I’ve changed, and that she can trust me to give her the life she’s always wanted.
The life we used to dream about in the bed of my truck, looking up at the stars.
I lift my head. “Since when are you okay with ‘fine’?”
“Since never. But with you, I’ll make an exception.”
“Dang, girl. You still got the zingers.”
Offering me a tight smile, she tilts her head. “Learned from the best. Or the worst. That’s you, by the way.”
“I was . . . a lot of things back then. Look, no one wants this weekend to be magical more’n me. Grady and Quinn—they’re some of my favorite people. They deserve to be celebrated. So let’s celebrate them, yeah? Leave the past where it belongs?”
She splashes me. “That’s a lot of past to, er, get past.”
“The expert songwriter at work.”
“Shut up.” She splashes me again.
“But really, Jo, I’m proud of you. All the work you put in—it’s really something to watch you make your dreams come true.
I can’t imagine how good it must feel to make music as beautiful and infectious as yours.
It’s just so . . . you. Makes my heart hurt in a good way. ” I pause. “And a really bad one too.”
I’ve practiced putting myself out there a lot lately. It can still be excruciating sometimes, but it’s getting easier the more I do it.
Her expression softens again. “It’s weird hearing that.”
“What? That we’re all proud as hell of our hometown girl?”
“No. Nobody calls me Jo. Not in my professional life, I mean.” She looks away, squinting against the reflection of the sunset on the water.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I should’ve asked—”
“It’s fine.”
“There’s that word again.”
Josie looks at me from the corner of her eye. “Okay. Maybe I’m not fine with you calling me that. Brings back memories is all.”
“Not the good ones?”
“Not the good ones.”
“But we had good ones, right? Because I think about them. A lot.”
She goes still, sinking into the water.
Finally, she starts swimming away. “I’m gonna go get another beer. Later, Wes.”
It’s her way of telling me not to follow her.
I don’t.